Leveson inquiry: after the admissions, Cameron faces a question of judgment

Prime minister must fill in some blanks despite many government acknowledgments of guilt over failure to regulate press

Cameron has acknowledged that the political class, including himself, became unhealthily close to newspaper ­executives Photograph: Stefan Rousseau, David Cheskin a for the Observer Stefan Rousseau, David Cheskin a/Observer

When David Cameron takes the witness stand at the Leveson inquiry on Thursday, it will be worth remembering that the Conservatives have already pleaded guilty to most of the charges being levelled against them.

John Major conceded this week that his government in 1990 missed an opportunity to implement the Calcutt report, which recommended a new statutory press complaints body. If he had done so, much of the wrongdoing by newspapers in the past decade would have been stopped.

Cameron has acknowledged that the political class, including himself, became unhealthily close to newspaper proprietors. "Too much time was spent courting the media and not enough time was spent confronting the problems," the prime minister has admitted.

He has also said the whole political class should have conceded it did not respond to the information commissioner's 2003 report highlighting the scale of press intrusion into people's privacy.

George Osborne, the chancellor, said last July – when discussing the appointment of Andy Coulson as Conservative director of communications – that "knowing what we know now, we regret the decision and I suspect that Andy Coulson would not have taken the job knowing what he knows now. But we did not have 20/20 hindsight when we made that decision".

The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has admitted he was responsible for the conduct of his special adviser, Adam Smith, and that he was shocked when he learnt of his behaviour. Smith maintained very close contact with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp during its BSkyB takeover bid. Smith "was not able to maintain the impartiality that he needed to because of the volume of communication, and I think that was where things went wrong as far as his communication was concerned".

The permanent secretary of the culture department, Jonathan Stephens, has also admitted the extent of the contact was too extensive and wrong, but seems to accept that Hunt was unaware of it. Cameron will propose a new relationship between special advisers and civil servants.

Again, an admission of error.

He will also formally concede that there needs to be greater clarity about how ministers conduct themselves if asked to handle a quasi-judicial decision, another admission that something went awry in the Hunt/BSkyB case.

Put together, there has already been a pretty comprehensive, if ad hoc, set of admissions of guilt or error by the government. The only issue for Thursday's hearing might seem to be the mitigating pleas and some inconsequential chinwagging about future press regulation.

Not quite. Cameron has some specific issues to answer about his conduct, most of which refer to his judgment as opposed to any malfeasance.

The first is whether he was too credulous in appointing Coulson in the first place. Osborne said he asked Coulson, the beating heart of Basildon, whether any more worrying disclosures were likely to come out about phone hacking while Coulson was News of the World editor. He said not.

Yet Major, in giving evidence this week, said he did not believe editors could be unaware of how stories reached their reporters. He said: "I find it very difficult to accept, as a lay onlooker, that editors and proprietors do not know how their reporters obtain stories. I find it very difficult to accept that when they get cash expenses of a significant size because they paid for something that they don't ask: 'What that's from? What's that for?'

"It defies credibility that they actually don't know what is happening and I think the 'I had no idea what was going on below me' argument is one that I find extremely difficult to accept."

Cameron, by contrast, was prepared to believe that Coulson was blissfully unaware of how his scoops rolled in at the News of the World. He will be asked how strongly he challenged Coulson about his involvement as the Guardian and civil cases showed wider wrongdoing at the paper.

Coulson has said he was not challenged by the prime minister, but Cameron says he questioned him many times. Cameron can reasonably reply that all the relevant public authorities said no new evidence had emerged and it is not his job to second-guess the police.

The prime minister may also be asked whether he should have told the cabinet secretary, Lord O'Donnell, that Hunt, as culture secretary, privately lobbied him to rein in business secretary, Vince Cable, over the BSkyB bid. O'Donnell had the task of deciding whether Hunt was an appropriate person to judge on the bid and was only told of the statement Hunt had made in favour of the bid in the Financial Times.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, argued at the Leveson inquiry on Wednesday that the private lobbying by Hunt did not "materially add" to his FT remarks.

But It also emerged that other options were available for handling the bid once Cable ruled himself out by telling undercover reporters that he had declared war on Rupert Murdoch. It was proposed by Cable that his then junior minister, Ed Davey, take on the bid role, but this was rejected by Clegg.

At the inquiry, Clegg appeared to be unclear how Hunt was chosen. By contrast, Coulson and Osborne were fully involved in the decision. More broadly, Leveson will want to investigate Cameron's approach to News International and the media regulator Ofcom.

Stewart Purvis, a senior figure inside Ofcom from 2007-10, told Channel 4's Dispatches this week that he remained baffled by the attitude taken by the Tories to Ofcom while they were in opposition. "For the first year and a half of Jeremy Hunt being the spokesman, they were positive about Ofcom. Suddenly, they were negative about Ofcom and we never got a clear explanation of why that change was made," he said.

Dispatches claimed this policy change can be dated to a speech given by Cameron on 6 July 2009 in which he promised a radical curb on Ofcom's powers. This policy announcement took place six weeks before James Murdoch's MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival in which he, too, launched a brutal attack on Ofcom. Two months later, Cameron was told by James Murdoch over drinks at a Mayfair club that the Sun would be backing the Conservatives party in the 2010 general election.

Leveson might well ask how this policy confluence occurred. There will be no new definitive evidence that Cameron adjusted his commercial policy to win political favours from News International – just a conglomeration of social gatherings and chumminess – what might be described as institutional cronyism.

Can Cameron also credibly hold to the Osborne line that he did not have a view on whether the bid's success would have been good for the media landscape and just saw the issue as a political inconvenience?

But for those looking for fireworks during Cameron's appearance at Leveson may disappointed. He will say there was no grand bargain and no new evidence is likely to surface to contradict this.

It is anyway increasingly clear that Lord Justice Leveson is aware that all previous proposals on press reform lie unread and unimplemented on the bottom shelf – just like the Calcutt report.

As a result, his focus is to create a political consensus around his recommendations. The education secretary, Michael Gove, has shown how resistant some Tories are to any extension of regulation and how much support his position has in parts of the press.

It is bound to be a calculation in Leveson's thinking that it may be unwise to push the Conservative politicians too hard on what happened over the BSkyB bid if he is to create that elusive consensus. Indeed, he said this week: "The way in which the BSkyB bid was addressed is a small but significant part of the story."

His chief focus will be to extract Cameron's thinking on definitions of media plurality, statutory regulation, fines and the distinction between comment and opinion.

It may be less thrilling, but Leveson, like Cameron, is thinking legacy, as much as illegality.

KEY QUESTIONS FOR CAMERON

• Why did you hire Andy Coulson given that you knew phone hacking had happened during his time as editor of News of the World?

• Why, despite mounting evidence of the scale of phone hacking at the News of the World in the Guardian in July 2009 and New York Times in September 2010, did you not seek independent assurances that Coulson did not know about criminality at the paper?

• Why was Coulson not put through the highest level of "developed vetting" security clearance when he joined No 10? Did you fear he would fail given the furore around the phone-hacking scandal?

• Rebekah Brooks claims you texted one another on a weekly basis. Did you text other newspaper executives as frequently? Did you sign those texts LOL?

• Given that you knew Jeremy Hunt believed the UK media sector would "suffer for years" if the BSkyB takeover was not approved and it would be "totally wrong to cave in" to opponents of the bid, why did you choose him to replace Vince Cable?

• Can you describe your conversation with Rupert Murdoch at the George club in London on 10 September 2009 at which he confirmed the Sun would back the Conservatives at the election?